


no one's gonna love you more than i do

by Aramley



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-14
Updated: 2011-09-14
Packaged: 2017-12-17 22:36:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/872744
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aramley/pseuds/Aramley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It's the kind of idea that seems brilliant at, say, two o'clock in the morning after a lot of champagne, and considerably less brilliant at six-thirty, blinking awake in an unfamiliar hotel room with a crick in the neck which comes from sleeping on the sofa. </i>
</p><p> </p><p>Novak gets drunk and decides to fix things between him and Rafa. This goes about as well as you'd expect.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no one's gonna love you more than i do

**Author's Note:**

> Set (and originally written and posted) after the 2011 US Open.

It's the kind of idea that seems brilliant at, say, two o'clock in the morning after a lot of champagne, and considerably less brilliant at six-thirty, blinking awake in an unfamiliar hotel room with a crick in the neck which comes from sleeping on the sofa. 

"He's awake now," someone says, a too-familiar voice. _Rafa_. Novak turns his face against the rough texture of the sofa cushions and groans. Rafa says, "He doesn't sound so good."

"I just want to die," Novak tells him, and himself, and the world.

"He say he will be there in twenty minutes," Rafa says to whoever he's talking to. Novak turns his head as far as his body will allow and sees Rafa sitting in a chair on the other side of the coffee table, talking into what looks like Novak's phone. He's not looking at Novak, instead looking down at his fingers spinning a piece of paper around on the table's polished glass surface. Everything is a little blurry with exhaustion and with the lack of either glasses or contact lenses. "Okay. I will tell him. Bye."

Novak's mouth tastes like a pair of socks, ones that have been worn for a five-hour match. He clears his throat, grimacing. "Who was that?"

"Marian," Rafa says, still not looking at Novak. He slides the phone across the table-top. Novak reaches out for it. Six thirty-three. Ugh. "He say you have to be back in your room in twenty minutes or he will throw you from the roof. He was worried when they couldn't find you."

"I told him where I was going," Novak says, then considers this. "Uh. Possibly. Possibly I told him."

"You were not making very much sense last night," Rafa says, looking at Novak for the first time. Amusement lurks, reluctantly, at the corners of his mouth. It's strange, because what Novak remembers most of all is the feeling of clarity, knowing exactly how he was going to go up to Rafa's room and make everything okay again, all the right words to say and how to say them. It was a feeling that hadn't lasted much past leaving the hotel bar, when he got lost somewhere on the third floor and had to call Rafa to come and find him.

"I'm sorry," Novak says, and it feels familiar, so he probably said that a lot last night. "I guess I had a lot to drink."

Rafa just shrugs, lightly. "You want to shower before you leave?"

"No. It's okay." Novak struggles up, pushing away the blanket that Rafa draped over him. His head protests, his stomach lurches. Truth is, he wants a shower more than anything, but not here. Not in Rafa's shower, where in better days they might have - Novak presses the heel of one hand roughly against his forehead. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine," Rafa says. He's gone back to playing with the paper and Novak, with a jolt in his stomach that has nothing to do with the hangover, recognises it. It's a hotel bar napkin, written over with a ten-point list of reasons why he and Rafa should get back together. From upside down his handwriting looks ragged and childish, close to illegible, and written in a mixture of English and Serbian and Italian, for no real reason other than the all-encompassing one of the alcohol. He doesn't remember every point on the list, but he knows that it starts and ends, like so many things, with _I love you_.

Rafa spots him looking at the paper. He pick it up and folds it along the crease, offers it to Novak. "You want to take it back?"

Novak wants to take a lot of things back. This isn't one of them. He shakes his head. "No."

Something about Rafa's expression softens, a fractional indulgence. "Okay," he says, and curls his fingers around the paper in a loose fist.

"You want to talk about it?"

Rafa blows out a short breath, and shakes his head. "Not today," he says, which Novak can't help but notice is not _never_.

"Okay," he says, because it is. Anything is, as long as Rafa is speaking to him.

Rafa holds his gaze a moment longer, even, assessing, unflinching. And, okay, it's not much. But it's not Miami, it's not Indian Wells; it's not Madrid, the night that Rafa couldn't look at him, or Wimbledon, when they weren't speaking.

"You should go," Rafa says, at last, and Novak swallows around a memory of those words in another hotel room, months ago, but it's different this time. The word's aren't sharp-edged and thrown the way vases are between dramatic couples on bad tv shows. Progress, he thinks. 

Movement is difficult, and sets off sparks of pain in his over-exerted muscles, his back, his swimming head. He is a ridiculous person and Marian is going to kill him. Novak is aware that he smells like stale champagne, and that Rafa is already freshly showered and clean-smelling, damp hair and clean clothes.

Novak nods at a collection of packed luggage in the corner of the room. "Your flight leaves today?"

"In a few hours," Rafa says.

"Oh," Novak says, while they stand awkwardly together at the door. It's not like they're strangers to sneaking out of each other's hotel rooms at odd hours of the day or night, but things are different now, fraught with too-recent history; at once intimate and distant, like the way they're standing, too close for friends and too far for lovers.

"Marian is waiting," Rafa says. The tension eases, a little. Novak exhales a breath he hadn't known he was holding.

"Yeah," he says. And then, before he can think better of it, all in a rush, "Look, please - call me, okay? Or text, or email, or just, I just. I miss you. "

"Nole," Rafa says, soft, but when Novak opens his mouth to beg he says, "Okay. Okay," with an abortive movement as if checking the impulse to reach out and brush Novak's arm with the knuckles of one hand, the hand still clutching the folded up paper napkin with Novak's list, that begins and ends with _I love you._


End file.
